Website audit. Audits. Auditing. Sounds like fun, right?
Okay this is an area of digital marketing that might not be for everyone, it doesn’t have the buzz of SEO or social media, but do not underestimate the value of auditing.
Whether is it a website audit, a social media audit or a content audit, a digital audit is the foundation point for building a great business.
Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
I don’t much care where –
Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?What is a website audit?
A website / SEO audit is a full analysis of everything related to your website’s search visibility. A complete and detailed audit will give you a deeper understanding as to why your site is not generating the traffic you think it should or why your sales and conversions are not improving in line with your expectations. Read more about website audits here.
Do I Need An Audit?
Over the last few years we have seen huge changes across search engines in how they show the results when someone does a search. It used to be that you could just add keywords to your meta tags and content, get a few back links and there you go you are ranking! Oh it was so easy…
It is no longer like that and Google continues to get smarter all the time and most business owners have not been able to keep up. There are hundreds of factors used by the search engines to determine how your site will be returned in the results, around 200 different attributes are used. Some of the more recent additions to these factors include:
- Site speed
- Responsiveness
- Content quality
- Backlink quality
What makes up a website audit?
An detailed website audit is not a quick process. For an small to mid size SME an audit can take between 2-5 days, for large firms this can easily run into weeks. Each audit is an in depth manual review of your website which is analysed and delivered with action points for improvements.
The audits that I run include a number of areas for review, such as
- Technical – making sure your site is setup well for search engines and users, and runs fast
- On-site – A full review and analysis of all website pages for correct keyword use, meta data, broken links, schema and structure to make sure everything is optimised.
- Off-site – I complete an analysis of back links and anchor text and authority and trust to review the external impact
- Social – A review of current mentions and visibility
Audits vary in complexity with the basic being around 20 pages and the Ultimate running at over 200 pages (don’t worry that includes some pretty pictures).
